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I'm having the latest WordPress and it's been long that I'm seeing my website's front page is being indexed with a different page title that I'm setting everywhere, at Settings->General->Site Title, and the page title field, and I am using also "SEO Ultimate" plugin and setting the page title tag as the same one I desire. But Google is indexing my home page with a different title, I tried "fetch as google" feature in webmastertools to reindex again and again but nothing changed.

Could anyone tell me please what makes Google index my home page differently than my settings? Please try searching (site:ashaker.com) in Google and you will see Google is showing the title as "web design in dubai", but when you browse the website, you will see the title is completely different".

Please advise, and thanks a lot in advance.

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  • Use SEO by Yoast it's the best SEO plugin at the time, also you can request reindex in webmaster tools (Search Console)
    – knif3r
    Mar 17, 2016 at 7:50

4 Answers 4

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Google already announce in their Webmaster Support that

If we’ve detected that a particular result has one of the above issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through.

May be it's for the better to increase impressions and clicks. Try to search some different terms and check your site title.

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This one is simple. Your title tag is too long!

This is a common mistake that I detail in these answers:

Title in Google does not match <title> of document

Title tag different from title appearing in Google?

There is a limit of 512 pixels at least for Google. I cannot speak for Bing. Any wider character such as W, G, D, or X will take up additional room. Some SEOs will recommend not going over 70 characters. But I suggest if you want to control how your site looks in the SERPs that you do not make a title tag too long or too short. In this case, the character limit could be 45-55 total for any title depending.

While we are on the subject, your description meta-tag should not be any longer than 170 characters. I suggest shorter, but long enough to be engaging. As well, either drop the keyword meta-tag or limit it to just a smaller list of keywords. The keyword meta-tag is only used by Yandex and in your case, far too long!

You can really control how your pages appear in the SERPs if you pay attention to not only the length, but how Google uses the pipe character and responds to a shorter title tag length, the description meta-tag, and SERP link alternatives such as the h1 tag. It can be a bit of an art, though not complicated. You just have to aware.

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  • I should have mentioned about the long title tag too but then lately google hasn't been giving me good results for my searches.
    – Mike -- No longer here
    Aug 30, 2015 at 6:14
  • @Mike Not being critical, I am rather suspect about Google lately especially in light of the new Panda 4.2. I have found some rather odd stuff going on in search and in relation to my site that makes me wonder if Google has not gotten too volatile in the past year or so. I see that small changes on a site makes huge changes in search when it should not. Tiny changes really upsets the apple cart and it should not be such a big deal. As a result, it seems that Google has become rather intolerant of innocent experimentation and prefers sites that remain largely unchanged- geared toward blogs.
    – closetnoc
    Aug 30, 2015 at 16:31
  • thanks for answering, but actually my title is just fine and never been over 70 characters, and if you ever checked my question and the website you will find that it shows as "web design in dubai" nothing more with "..." that shows if my title was longer, "web design in dubai" is not a part from my title to cut the pixels or so, thanks @closetnoc but your answer is not relevant to my question
    – Mojito
    Sep 5, 2015 at 11:14
  • @Mojito It just hat to be over 512 pixels. The 79 character count is bad advice. Generally, you cannot control the SERP link unless you are less than 50-55 char. You have to also know that Google will generally chose what it wants. If you do a site: search and you do not see the titles you expect, it is about title tag length- nothing else.
    – closetnoc
    Sep 6, 2015 at 0:40
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It happens to a number of websites, not just yours.

Google likes to keep a cache of web pages so that users can have an option to see the real site or if the real site breaks down, the user can choose to view Google's cached copy of the site.

What you can do is:

  1. Resubmit your sitemaps

  2. Change site settings in webmaster tools and make google crawl more pages a second instead of its typical 0.33/second

  3. Use the no-archive meta tag to prevent google from caching your pages, but this method will require you to use more bandwidth from the server your website is hosted on.

See: http://searchengineland.com/google-explains-the-noindex-nofollow-noarchive-nosnippet-meta-tags-10595 for more info on the tag.

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  • thx @mike for answering, i am talking about 2 years where my title doesn't change on google index, i submitting fresh sitemaps frequently and maintaining the seo process over time, as i mentioned, "fetch as google" feature in webmastertools won't leve any cashed version on google index, so i am sure 100% this page is not cached on google index, the lastes version in google index (which is exactly the same of the original page) is just showing a different title than the original, i believe this is a wordpress issue tells google to have this title instead, i just can't figure out where to find
    – Mojito
    Sep 5, 2015 at 11:19
  • Google must be seriously delayed with what it has in its database. In fact, its even searching for files on my site that once existed like 3 years ago but now no longer exist. I'll be surprised if their database is less than 100TB in size
    – Mike -- No longer here
    Sep 5, 2015 at 15:19
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I think the logo's alt="Web Design in Dubai" is creating problem. Could you please change this alt text to something natural and then try submitting the home page to Google index through Google Webmaster Tools (Fetch as Googlebot) and check whether it changes the title in the SERP?

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